If I Were Vicomte
by Igenlode Wordsmith
Summary: Christine's childhood friend is convinced that all his problems would be solved by a little more social position. Vignettes from an AU Leroux universe.
1. Jeunesse

_A/N: This was inspired by a discussion I had with **emeraldphan** back in 2013; it's just taken me a while!_

 _What if 'Raoul' had never been born a de Chagny at all...?_

* * *

 **If I Were Vicomte**

 **1.** _**Jeunesse**_

The sun shone bright across Trestraou's sands on the day the wandering fiddler came, and the wind raced across the wide bare sweep of that great strand with nothing to halt it but the church high above and the handful of cottages down by the shore. The fiddler and his little daughter had roamed from village to village for weeks, playing and singing as they went and refusing all payment save a bed of straw for the night and a dish of fresh milk in the morning, and much talk had been made of it thereabouts. But to the barefoot children who scuffled amidst their fathers' nets, the big man with a fiddle-case slung over his shoulder was simply a stranger in a place where no new face was seen from one season to the next, and they watched him from a distance and with wide eyes.

The newcomer and the little girl came down to the shore and stood hand in hand, gazing out across the unmarked sands that stretched away beneath that vast overarching sky. The wind stirred in the man's fair beard and blew his forelock across his eyes, and the girl drew her scarf more closely round her face to cover her hair. After a time her father drew out his instrument and began to play there on the empty beach, a music that was not written down but echoed back the wide waters and the golden strand and the seabirds that soared upon the breeze, crying, their voices as plaintive as the sound of the fiddle far below.

The little girl stood and listened for a while, entranced. But presently she began to stray from her father's side to gather shells and stones at the water's edge, where the tossing waves foamed and rushed in and died, each leaving behind a momentary glistening treasure of sea-jewels and shining coral that dried to dullness in the seeker's hand.

The fiddler's uncanny music came drifting in snatches down the wind to where the fishermen's children watched, and his daughter came nearer and nearer to them unheeding in her lonely game. Then, as she stooped once more to the sand, it happened. A gust stronger than the rest caught teasingly at her scarf and tugged it loose, sending it dancing for an instant just beyond her outstretched fingertips as she cried out. Then it was whirling away and out over the waves to settle at last for a final few moments on the surface of the glittering sea.

Her father, caught up in his fiddle-playing, could surely not have seen what had happened. For he went on with his wild tune, oblivious, while his daughter wrung her hands in dismay and seemed about to plunge into the breakers, warm and well-clad as she was in her heavy skirts and the sturdy button-boots that would weigh her down.

The children of the coast had been schooled not to mix with strangers. No good ever came of interfering in the lives of outsiders, they learnt from the cradle, no matter how well-meant. But they took in also with their mothers' milk the pitiless nature of the sea. For those few fatal seconds they murmured, but did nothing.

One among them, however, had not paused for thought. He was much the same age as the stranger girl but already apprenticed to his father, with hands that had learnt to handle the tiller or to run a boat up the shore, and with the reddish-fair Breton hair and clear blue eyes. Barefoot and lightly clad in his worn shirt and trousers, he was already sprinting towards her where she stood undecided on the shore.

"Don't worry, mademoiselle," he promised, "I'll fetch your scarf!" And with that he had plunged waist-deep into the surf in pursuit of the wisp of cloth which was even then beginning to sink beneath the waves.

For a moment his fair head seemed to vanish in its turn as the seas rolled remorselessly in. Then he reappeared, soaked and bedraggled but triumphant, like a knight of old with the lady's token clutched in one hand. As he came up the beach towards the girl whose scarf he held, he had already begun to shiver in the biting wind. But he seemed oblivious to the water that streamed from his clothes. And so did she, as she flung her arms about him in gratitude and gave him a kiss.

"What's your name, monsieur? I'm Christine Daaé."

The title of 'monsieur' brought a flush to his cheek where the childish kiss had not. "I'm just Yann, mademoiselle. Yann Le Coennec, of this parish." His French, like hers, held an accent; but it was the Breton lilt.

~o~

In the weeks that followed, the children came to spend almost every day together when Yann was not out with the boats. The warm clutter of his home was a happy one; but he had never known anyone like Christine. His mother, for whom Yann's lack of brothers and sisters had always been a source of sorrow, welcomed the little girl into their cottage.

His father was more wary. Christine was artless, and it had not taken long for them to discover that she was no vagrant fiddler's daughter, but that she and her father were living with a university professor who had come as a summer visitor to Perros-Guirec, and that Professor Valerius was overseeing Christine's education. Yann had learned his letters from the village curé, and even that was more than his parents had ever done. It was not right for the Daaé girl to be mixing with the likes of them. She would turn up her nose at a poor fishing family.

But Christine paid no heed to Yann's darned clothes, or the rough fare his mother cooked. She envied the hard, sure soles that let him climb over rocks and run barefoot without the cost of shoe-leather, and by the end of the summer she too had schooled herself at the cost of much practice to set aside boots and stockings and run wild with the rest. She would sit at the chimney-breast while Yann rubbed her little pink feet with salt-water-and-vinegar, which he had most earnestly promised would take away the soreness and make them strong and hard, listening with rapt attention to the tales his mother told as she stirred the cooking-pot.

In turn Christine would coax her father to recount some of her childhood favourites for Yann. The curé, who had a fondness for the boy, had persuaded Daaé to give Yann some violin lessons; and so after fiddling his way with increasing confidence through a few old folk tunes, to Christine's patent delight. Yann would sit cross-legged by the wayside at his teacher's feet, beneath the old tree where their lessons customarily took place, and listen enchanted to tales of the far North in Daaé's soft Swedish accent. And often a small hand, uncalloused and eager, would slip into his grasp and squeeze tight at the most exciting moments.

They shared the same taste in stories; the same calm and dreamy nature that took pleasure in music or the spinning of words, that carried Christine away when she sang her father's songs in a strong small treble, and that captured Yann's imagination when the winds sang harsh and clear across the sea, and the tiller leapt joyously in his hand like a live thing. And Christine took such pleasure in the old Breton tales that she and Yann were soon to be found roaming all over the moors and down the little lanes. He would lead her to all the old gaffers and gammers he knew who could be begged, argued or pleaded with to lay aside whittling-knife or spindle and unfold ancient legends and yarns of former days, while the children listened, hand in hand. Christine's gentle ways won her friends wherever she went, and Yann did his best to mould his manners on hers. People remarked upon what a fine-looking pair they made: the pretty Swedish child and the fisherman's boy with bare feet and a crop of red-gold hair, who seemed to look up to her and look after her almost in the same breath.

But the story they both loved best of all was one that her father told. It was the story of the Angel of Music, who once in a lifetime would come down from heaven to visit those children who showed talent and studied hard, and bestow upon them that elusive touch that men called genius. Christine had heard this tale since infancy, but every time it held her spellbound with its promise that some day she too might share in that magic. And all the while Yann would gaze at the little girl with the fair plaits and the dreamy eyes, his very own angel of music, who had unknowingly brought enchantment into his life.

~o~

Autumn came, and the children were parted. The winter in Brittany was hard that year, and there was not always enough to eat; but Yann's clothes had begun to gape at wrists and ankles, and his mother sometimes went short so that he should have enough. When the storms abated, around the turning of the year, his father began to take him out with the boats every day to set his growth to good use, and Yann obeyed without complaint, so there was food set on the table and a warm fire at night and the lean times began to fade. All the time he was waiting for the news that Professor Valerius had returned to Brittany once more.

But Christine's father had already begun to cough that last summer, and he was no longer strong enough to roam the villages or sleep in the hay. Christine and Madame Valerius were constantly in attendance at his side. And the fishing fleet went out with every tide, so that Yann's hands were cracked with the salt and torn by the ropes and grew to a horny hardness that was too clumsy to finger the delicate neck of a violin; and he had no time to make the long walk up to the house at Perros-Guirec to find out why Christine did not come.

He said nothing. Indeed, he grew very silent, and his father took it for sullenness and spoke sharply to the boy. But at the back of his mind there was always the thought that he was only a poor fisher-lad and Christine had been brought up to mix with those of gentle birth.

"If I had a title," he burst out one day to the curé, "if I had even the smallest, least grand of titles — if I were some young baron or vicomte, and not just plain Yann — then I could see her whenever I liked. Her father would have all the medicine he needed. If I were vicomte, when winter came my mother would be happy and well and my father would be kind to me. If I were vicomte, none of this would be happening!"

But the old man could only lend a sympathetic ear, for they both knew that such things were the stuff of fairy-tales.


	2. Matelot

**2. _Matelot_**

It was three years before he saw Christine again, and when he did it was under very different circumstances. His father's boat, caught by unseasonal gales, had put in at Toulon, and there the boy had caught the attention of the navy. Well-grown and muscled for his age, and handy on the water, Yann Le Coennec was just the type of sailor on whom the fleet had had its eye for centuries immemorial, and the long and the short of it was that young Yann had found himself enlisted almost willy-nilly into the _Marine National_ — the service which he soon learned to call 'La Royale', the nickname for the navy time out of mind.

Yann accepted it with a shrug, as he accepted most things these days. But when he found himself with a few days' embarkation leave a brief flicker of independence woke, and he turned aside from the long road back from his dépôt to call at the little house in Perros-Guirec.

It had ben a hot week of merciless sun, and his new uniform smock, still stiff from the slop-chest, was powdered with whitish dust from the road. He brushed at it vainly, his throat dry, before tugging at the bell.

Would anyone be at home? Would Daaé be there? Would it be some new rich family fresh down from Paris, who would turn a footsore sailor away from their threshold as a vagrant or worse?

But it was Daaé himself who answered the door, Daaé with his broad frame shrunken by illness and grey in his beard, so that Yann was hard put to it to keep the first impulse of shock and pity from his face. "Monsieur? Monsieur, I'm Yann... Yann who learnt the violin — do you remember?"

The greying beard broke apart in a great smile of welcome, and road-dust or no road-dust Yann found himself enfolded in a bear-hug embrace whose affection brought a sudden rush of tears to his eyes. He hugged the other man back tightly. "I wondered," Daaé was saying, "I often wondered..."

And then somehow he was being invited into a neat little parlour where he scarcely dared sit down, and Christine came through from the kitchen beyond, blushing and smiling at once, with a tray in her arms. He took the cool drink she offered him, but kept it awkwardly between his hands despite the dryness in his throat. Indeed, his throat seemed to have seized up altogether.

Her touch had brushed against his when he took the glass, and his heart was racing unaccountably. After all, they had gone hand in hand so often before... but it was not the same any longer. Christine's figure was no longer that of a child, and he was suddenly conscious of the new gruffness in his own voice, and the breadth of his shoulders. From where he sat he ventured a glance up into her face, and found her very red and looking the other way. But the lace at her throat was rising and falling in a way that it had not done before, and he felt colour rise to his cheeks in response.

Her father was surveying the pair of them gravely, with a certain expression that Yann could not interpret. "Perhaps you would take our visitor out into the garden for me, Christine? He has had a hot day's travel, and the two of you must have much to say to each other."

And presently, the cool glass with its dewdrops of moisture still clutched in one hand, he found himself sitting in a little roofed shelter all covered with some climbing plant that bore flowers in profusion. The garden behind the house was green and manicured to a degree he had never imagined, with winding paths and hedges all around, and they were quite alone. Christine Daaé hesitated a little and then took a seat at his side, a decorous distance away so that her skirts just brushed his knee, but with every breath that she drew he was intensely, confusingly aware of her.

Christine's attention seemed fixed upon a nodding blossom to her right that swayed in the breeze. Hands folded in her lap, she cleared her throat without looking at him.

"So, monsieur, I see you are in the navy now?"

He could not bear this new stiffness between them.

"I'm just Yann, mademoiselle. Still Yann..." He swallowed likewise and reached over to brush her sleeve with his fingers, where her own lay locked inviolate in her lap.

She trembled beneath his touch, and he flinched and snatched the importunate hand away, staring straight out into the garden in his turn. But a moment later small, hesitant fingers crept across into his, answering the shy pressure of his response with movement of their own, so that his stilted answers to her conversation came more and more at random than ever, while their fingers made reply to each other on a subject that neither could voice.

They remained outside all that afternoon, talking together with polite constraint on a dozen matters of no real concern. When the sun grew low her father came out to find them, with a smile for Yann and a quizzical look for his daughter. But Christine only blushed again, most charmingly, and got up to escort their guest out to the road.

So it was by the roadside that Yann made his farewells to Christine Daaé. His heart was full; full of things he could not say and only half understood, most coherent among them a mutinous fury against a stroke of fate that had granted him the chance to see her anew only to compel him off to sea almost in the same breath.

If he were a man of position — it was the old cry — if he were the merest vicomte, born into some great family, then his life would not be decided for him like this. He would not be sent off to join a ship and sleep among fifty others, subject to the whim of any officer on board. He would be able to go when he pleased, and stay when he pleased. And no-one would be able to frown at him for courting any girl in the whole of France...

He had never been more conscious of his own coarse clothes, the garments of a common sailor, compared to the neatness and delicacy of everything she wore. Her feet were tiny; was it possible that he had once chafed them cheerfully and obliviously between his hands, when he trembled at the very thought of kneeling before them now?

Somehow he stumbled through the conventional forms of goodbye with a hard, pulsing knot of misery lodged within his breast. At the last moment he caught up her hand and pressed a hopeless, clumsy kiss to it. "I'll never forget you — never!"

Then he turned and went away as fast as he could, cursing himself for having said so little and said it so late, and above all for having said it at all. For he knew very well that Yann Le Coennec could never aspire to the hand of a girl like Christine Daaé.


	3. L'Officier

**3. _L'Officier_**

 _La Royale_ was good to the young Breton sailor. Yann proved quick and obedient, and self-possessed and nimble aloft. He drew the approbation of his officers without incurring the enmity of the _sous-officier_ set over him, and found himself promoted; first among the seamen, then — after completing his first voyage around the world — among the cadets.

No allowances were made for his lack of education, and he was expected to study alongside the rest. Yann set his teeth and puzzled out mathematics and navigation along with the duffers of the class, taking a fierce pride in the speed with which he overhauled these schoolboys. It was at this time that he began to cultivate a moustache.

In the winter that he turned twenty-one he was a slim, bright-haired young man with a boyish freckled face, confident in his profession but shy among women, with whom his lack of experience put him at a disadvantage. In his leisure hours he read voraciously, in an attempt to remedy the deficiencies in his education. When one of the senior lieutenants proposed a party of pleasure to Paris among the young officers in port, since Yann's ship was laid up for repairs for the next several months he for one accepted eagerly.

For many of them, young provincials that they were, it was their first sight of Paris, and Lieutenant Philippe was hard-put to it to keep his motley charges in order — for the good name of the service, as he snapped on more than one occasion. Their excursion to the Opera was marked by a sizeable degree of disruption in the stalls as the more unruly members of the party passed observation not only upon the dancers on stage, but upon the well-fed _bourgeoisie_ seated around them, and Philippe's patience was stretched to its limit.

Only Yann remained quiet and enthralled throughout, by the wistful yearning of the violins, to begin with, and then by mounting memories and disbelief. He had never heard opera before, and the spectacle of a grown man throwing his voice about in trills and runs like a shepherd's pipe was at first bizarre and then simply tedious. The choruses pleased him better, with their echoes of the hearty singing on board ship; as for the women, with their brightly painted faces and their voluptuous airs, he had always heard that females on the stage were no better than common streetwalkers and to his disapproving eye they certainly looked the part.

So when Christine stepped out from amid the chorus, took a breath, and sent a hard little voice out into the auditorium in response to the operatics of the leading lady, he could scarcely believe it was her. The little girl who had sung to the seals on the sands and taken such pleasure in her father's folk tunes — could she be the same as that crudely-coloured singing puppet up there on stage, who warbled without feeling and went stiffly through her part?

He knew nothing about opera, of course, but the feather-boa around the neck of the Parisian lady in front quivered as she leant over to direct a disparaging remark about "the little Daaé" to her husband in the neighbouring seat, and there could be no more doubt. Yann was torn between shame on her behalf and a wild, confused desire to defend her.

He returned to the Opera again and again. He tried to speak to her backstage. He hid behind pieces of scenery in order to accost her. But she gave no sign that she recognised the young Breton at all. His only consolation was that — far from his imaginings — she did not acknowledge anyone else either.

There came a gala night when the audience went wild, and Yann for all his ignorance began to understand why. Christine was no longer singing the rôle of the maid or confidante in which he had first heard her; she was singing centre-stage, pouring out melody and ornament without end, and her voice was no longer that of the expressionless little doll. In the past weeks he had come to learn a little of opera and to form a preference between one style and another, but even his untutored ear was swept away by the passion and purity in Christine's voice tonight. Men around him were in tears, and in the boxes above the rich patrons had stilled their conversation to lean forward, drawn despite themselves to the frail girl on the stage.

She sang Juliet, and she was once again the blushing girl in the garden, with her heart in her eyes and in her silver throat in place of the shy movement of her hand in his. She sang Marguerite, who rejects her unworthy lover's rescue for the glories of heaven, and the agony of that rejection tore through him like a knife of guilt. So when she trembled and seemed to fall, Yann thought at first that this, too, was only a part of her art. But she did not rise; and when consternation began and she was carried off stage, he felt his own blood drain until he was as white as a sheet and on the point of collapse.

~o~

He need not have concerned himself, he thought bitterly now. It would have been different, no doubt, if he had been one of the fashionable crowd, with a fine address in a fancy part of town, and a title to dangle beneath her nose. But Christine Daaé in the wake of her great success clearly had better things to do than pass the time of day with some jumped-up peasant out of her past.

She'd forgotten him. She'd _pretended_ she'd forgotten him, which was worse. And she'd laughed at him, which was worst of all.

He'd done everything he could to try to see her and explain. He'd even written her a letter begging permission to pay her a call, and if he'd had any sense he'd have taken the message from the dead silence he'd received in reply and gone off to find consolation elsewhere.

But it was easy, so easy, to make a fool of a boy with no rank and no position... and so he'd come tearing down here to Perros-Guirec at the first crook of her little finger, only to be faced with that incredible story about an angel in her dressing-room. He'd travelled the world. He held his commission. He wasn't the naïve country yokel she took him for.

Yann groaned in frustration and turned over in his bed at the _auberge du Soileil-Couchant_ , too strung up and exhausted to sleep. He'd jolted all night in the train and then the stagecoach, wedged upright into a corner of the seat. He'd had no appetite for lunch and had made a poor supper, solitary and miserable by the fire with Christine shut away in her room upstairs. The day seemed endless.

"If I were vicomte," Yann told himself in a rush of hopeless anger, "I'd have travelled down here in the first place cocooned in luxury. I'd have laughed off these fancies of hers like a man of the world. And instead of tossing up here on a hard bed"—this was an injustice to the inn's excellent mattresses, but he was in no state to care—"I'd be snugly down there in the parlour with my arm about Christine's waist and her head on my shoulder, talking over old times and planning our future..."

He broke off. There had come a noise from Christine's room.

Ten minutes later he had flung on some clothes and was climbing impetuously out into a snowy tree without an overcoat. And an hour after that, chilled to the bone and with his senses reeling in disbelief, Yann was lying senseless on the altar steps of the little church at Perros-Guirec, where he was not found until it was almost too late.


	4. Les Amants

**4. _Les Amants_**

Buffeted amid the chaos and panic of the Opera, Yann was desperate for help... and no-one would listen to him. But then, they never had. His own utter insignificance had never been driven so brutally home to him as in the past weeks, since Perros.

He'd managed to convince himself that Christine had sacrificed her self-respect and become the mistress of some dissolute young aristocrat; he was hotly ashamed of that now, but at the time it had seemed the only explanation. Where else could she have been staying, in those weeks when she was absent from her home? Who else would parade with her around Paris in a carriage? And who else could have procured for her lessons of a quality to enable her so quickly to excel, and the convenient rendezvous at the Opera that went with them?

And so Yann had posted himself out of jealous suspicion in that lover's lane behind the racecourse, then proceeded to make an even bigger fool of himself in his ridiculous pierrot costume at the masked ball. Some of the things he'd said — and thought — about her were burned painfully into his conscience still.

But nobody had paid any attention in the least to his increasing desperation to find her, either then, after the disaster of the chandelier, or now, in his rival's final, culminating stroke. Christine Daaé had just been snatched from the stage before his very eyes, bare minutes before he himself had planned to carry her off.

He'd have helped take her to safety even if she hadn't agreed to marry him, of course. But with the prohibition from the "Angel of Music" revealed for the fraud that it was, the only thing keeping them apart had been her fear of what this Erik might do to Yann out of jealousy. After all, his career was secure, his future bright, and Yann was quite certain that his parents would be happy to give them a home when he brought home little Christine as his bride.

They'd pledged themselves to one another a month ago in secret. It was not, however, until he had mentioned his plans for marriage to the senior lieutenant yesterday that he'd been subjected to the full offensive force of Philippe's views on the subject. On officers who, as he put it, were fool enough to take on a leg-shackle in their infancy and marry the first piece of skirt who ensnared them.

Yann's fists clenched again, remembering it. He'd stormed out of their lodging this morning with every intention of carrying through his plan and furious at the regulations that kept him subject to such dinosaurs of opinion. Philippe had paid no more attention to his arguments than the managers had when he'd begged them all those weeks ago for information on Christine's whereabouts — they saw him as a nobody, no doubt, whose enquiries were to be impatiently brushed aside — or the police inspector who a few minutes ago had all too clearly treated Yann Le Coennec's pleas for help as ravings born of peasant superstition. In his quest for Christine he'd been jostled and laughed at by everyone from the audience to the concierge... and now he was being accosted by a Persian who appeared to delight in talking in riddles.

If he had a title to wave in their faces, Yann thought helplessly, people might at least _pretend_ to take him seriously...

* * *

It all seemed a very long time ago, now.

His watch ticked quietly on its nail in the cottage wall where he had hung it, and the Breton sea-breeze brought the sound of the waves faintly from the beach below. Outside the dusk was drawing in and it was growing chill; but there was a fine fire crackling in the hearth with the stock-pot swinging over it, and he'd filled and lit the lamps when he came in. The little room was warm and bright, and it was easy at last to talk over events beneath the Opera as if they were no more than a distant reminiscence — or a tale told to two eager children all those years ago.

Some things he could finally even laugh about. Others not so much.

"And did he ever explain 'your hand at the level of your eyes'?"

Yann considered the question, thinking back over those hectic hours of trust and terror. He'd been through so much at the mysterious Persian's side... but they'd never even had the chance to say goodbye. He remembered his last view of the man, grey-faced and barely breathing in that heavy, old-fashioned bed.

He hoped the Persian, too, had survived. He'd never had the chance to find out.

His wife had raised an enquiring eyebrow, looking up from her lace, and Yann gave her a rueful smile. "Explain? You know, I don't believe he ever did."

Gazing across at her cherished fair head, gilded now by the lamplight as she bent again over her work, he felt a familiar pang of guilt. She had sung in front of glittering crowds. She could have been the toast of Paris. She deserved so much more than this cramped cottage on the fringes of France and a life shared with the fishermen's wives. And he would have to rejoin his ship soon, leaving her bereft and lonely...

"If only I had more than this to give you," he burst out for the hundredth time. "If I were vicomte, we wouldn't be living in obscurity in this little place — you would have a maid and furs, as you did at home, and we wouldn't be virtual exiles—"

Christine set aside the tiny cap she had been trimming, and smiled up at him with more love in her eyes than any one heart could hold. "Dear Yann... I think we do very well as we are. Don't you?"

And with his mother's warm soup simmering over the fire, with Philippe mollified and those childhood dreams all come true, Yann Le Coennec began to have faith in his own good fortune at last.


End file.
